The Simp Economy
The Psychology Behind Simping
We go on the internet with different reasons and goals in mind. It could be to find out the answer to a burning question, chat with a friend or watch a few dog videos. One similarity all activities share is consuming your attention. Monetisation of attention as a business model has led businesses to strategically capture our attention and engagement for profit. Individuals have also adapted, creating a branch known as the Simp Economy.
A New Simp
Why do people form connections with people they’ve never met or interacted with? In 1968 a psychologist named Robert Zajonc conducted a series of experiments on how we perceive familiarity. He would post nonsense words such as “civadra” or “saricik” on the front page of student newspapers for several weeks and ask at the end if they thought the words meant something good or bad.¹ He found that the words he frequently repeated, the more they were associated with a positive connotation versus the words that appeared only once or twice. Zajonc proposed that repeated exposure to a stimulus can create a feeling of warmth and trustworthiness, known as the mere exposure effect. Basically, the more you see something, the more you’ll tend to have a preference for it.
Makes sense right? Interestingly, this effect also applies with seeing people. In…